Sr Software Architect Perception Systems

Summary

Apple is where individual imaginations gather together, committing to the values that lead to great work. Every new product we build, service we create, or Apple Store experience we deliver is the result of us making each other's ideas stronger. That happens because every one of us shares a belief that we can make something wonderful and share it with the world, changing lives for the better. It's the diversity of our people and their thinking that inspires the innovation that runs through everything we do. When we bring everybody in, we can do the best work of our lives. Here, you'll do more than join something: you'll add something. At Apple, we strive to make great products that empower people and improve their lives. We believe recent breakthroughs in AI/ML and robotics have the potential to unlock new experiences that were never possible before, and we are looking for a talented senior software architect to help realize that mission by architecting the perception software stack behind these experiences.

Description

As a member of the team, you'll have the opportunity to work with a team of highly skilled engineers and scientists to bring new experiences to Apple products. We are looking for a senior software architect to be the directly responsible individual for the software architecture of our perception stack: the runtime, data flow, and system infrastructure that turn perception and ML algorithms into a fast, reliable, and secure product. You will set the technical direction for the stack and serve as the team's primary technical partner to hardware, software, and product teams across Apple. This role is a great fit for a systems engineer who has shipped latency-sensitive software at scale, understands perception and robotics well enough to be a true partner to algorithm engineers, and enjoys making the work of many teams fit together into one coherent system.

Key Responsibilities

This position requires strong technical and interpersonal skills to handle responsibilities including: * Serving as DRI for the end-to-end software architecture of the perception stack, from camera, audio, and other sensor inputs through algorithm execution to downstream consumers, and setting its long-term technical direction. * Designing and building a real-time, graph-based dataflow runtime that schedules perception and ML workloads across heterogeneous compute (e.g., CPU, GPU, Neural Engine) with predictable latency. * Defining the system foundations that perception depends on, including sensor time synchronization, calibration management, inter-process communication, and data logging. * Ensuring privacy and security are core to the architecture, including isolating sensitive sensor processing in secure execution environments. * Partnering with perception and ML engineers to bring algorithms and models from prototype to production on device, making principled tradeoffs across latency, accuracy, power, and memory. * Building telemetry, tracing, profiling, and record/replay into the stack from day one, so that performance, stability, and regressions can be measured and reproduced against real-world data. * Driving cross-functional alignment with hardware, software, and platform teams across Apple on architecture, interfaces, dependencies, and integration schedules. * Partnering with program managers to break the roadmap into milestones, deliver against them, and re-plan when requirements change. * Setting engineering standards through design reviews and mentorship, and clearly communicating architectural decisions and tradeoffs to engineers and leadership.

Minimum Qualifications

10+ years building production systems software in C/C++, Swift, with deep knowledge of concurrency, scheduling, memory management, and IPC on a modern operating system. A track record of shipping latency-sensitive or real-time systems to customers, with measurable performance and reliability targets. Experience designing dataflow or algorithm-graph runtimes across heterogeneous compute. Experience designing telemetry, tracing, and profiling into systems, and using that data to drive performance and stability work. Working knowledge of classical perception and robotics (e.g., sensor fusion, time synchronization, calibration, state estimation, tracking, or SLAM/VIO). Experience deploying ML models into production runtimes, including quantization, scheduling, and performance tradeoffs. Demonstrated technical leadership across team and organizational boundaries. Experience partnering with program managers to break work into milestones, deliver against them, and re-plan when requirements change. Clear written and verbal communication with both engineers and leadership. BS or MS in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

Real-time Linux expertise (e.g., PREEMPT_RT, CPU isolation, cgroups, deterministic scheduling) or RTOS experience. Deep experience with Darwin/XNU internals, secure execution environments, or microkernel-based isolation. Experience shipping consumer hardware products at scale. Experience with robotics middleware and logging (e.g., ROS 2, DDS, MCAP) and record/replay or simulation infrastructure. Experience building evaluation pipelines, regression testing, or data feedback loops for ML-driven systems. Familiarity with modern learned perception, multimodal models, or agentic AI workflows.